Some People Sell Trust for the Price of Being Included

The worst betrayals are not always dramatic.

Sometimes they are small.

A nervous laugh. A name mentioned to the wrong person. A secret repeated for approval. A moment where someone trusts you, and you decide their trust is useful currency.

Chapter 17 of TARTARUS returns to the day after the promise and before the locked door.

The narrator has remembered that he told Nadine about the depot. What he has not yet remembered is what he did with that knowledge next.

The bus stops beside a schoolyard.

Three boys stand behind the fence: Marcus, Tim, and the narrator at twelve years old.

And the scene begins to develop.

Marcus had a specific talent. Some boys do. They can make another boy feel excluded just by breathing in his direction. He did not need to threaten. He only needed to offer the possibility of belonging and then look bored while you ruined yourself trying to earn it.

That is the emotional engine of this chapter.

The narrator did not bring Marcus and Tim to the depot because he was evil.

That would be simpler.

He brought them because he wanted to belong.

Because the bored approval of a stronger boy felt more valuable than the quiet trust of a younger girl.

Because cruelty often does not begin as hatred.

It begins as a transaction.

The secret place Nadine trusted him with becomes a way for him to buy his place among the boys.

I had sold Nadine’s hiding place for one bored smile from a boy who would not remember my name properly in ten years.

There is something especially ugly about betrayals committed for people who do not even value us.

We betray the soft thing for the hard thing.

The person who trusts us for the person who might accept us.

The intimate promise for public safety.

And the price is almost always higher than we understand at the time.

When Nadine sees Marcus and Tim, she says she does not want to go with them.

The narrator has one more chance.

He could listen.

He could protect the promise.

Instead, he says:

Don’t be weird.

That line is small, but devastating. Because it is how people learn to distrust their own fear. It is how boundaries get made embarrassing. It is how someone’s accurate instinct becomes “drama.”

At the end of the chapter, the notebook writes:

You invited the witnesses.

And when the narrator tries to defend himself with age, fear, and wanting to fit in, the road answers with the simplest sentence:

She was eight.

Full chapter on Substack: https://substack.com/@alexkorneliuk

existential fiction, literary fiction, weird fiction, magical realism, road novel, betrayal, childhood guilt, peer pressure, trust, responsibility, psychological fiction, dark literary fiction